LevinK,

It is obviously NOT there for roadside bombers.

Remember last fall when Iran ordered three of their divisions to be ready to move into Iraq in the event of an American attack on Iran. They may decide not to that in the event of an American attack, but the military wants that asset.

You can't hide large scale deployments in an open society. It cannot be done. You can confuse people by making it appear they might be going somewhere else, but everyone knows when a full aircraft carrier of seamen are gone from their home port so there is no point in trying to pretend that they are not deployed. As someone who has followed deployments since I left the military 20+ years ago, I disagree completely with your assertion that we would not know about it. We would indeed know about it, just as public deployment information made the Iraq invasion obvious as well as the first Gulf war. The only excuse for not knowing about it is simply failing to observe the publicly available information. This neither tells us if Bush will attack Iran or not but those forces are deployed.

If you had watched the "underway" list over the last 45 days you would realize that there are now 3 different complete Marine expeditionary groups in the Persian Gulf region. That page only lists the "underway" assets and once they arrive "on station" the name of the ship or other asset is removed from the page. However, I've watched three complete Marine expeditionary groups go to the Persian Gulf and not return yet.

Do I think this is saber rattling? Yes, but those forces are real, in place, and have the firepower to at least start something even if they can't finish it.